I like to leave reviews for places I stay and eat. But, I hate to keep feeding the Google machine. Yelp seems to be mostly a US thing, and I’m not a power Trip Advisor user (although I have nothing against them).
Where do you read/leave reviews the most?
I just don’t bother reviewing that much, as much as it annoys me not to because I want to try and be helpful. Like, there’s no safe space for you to go to, to review your workplace. Other places, when reviewing products, only care to read 4 and 5 star reviews but never the lower ones even if they were constructive.
But I find reviewing workplaces the hardest because, apparently you can be fired if someone connects the dots and find out you work for them to want to fire you over it.
Yelp is shit. I used to be a small business owner and they would call me trying to get me to sign up for a paid account strongly suggesting that they could ‘help’ with bad reviews. To me that means that businesses can just sign up and get bad reviews removed or pushed out of regular view. What good is a review site if the business can hide bad reviews?
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard a similar story from a small business owner and I stopped using Yelp for the most part. I overheard a conversation that Yelp was really pushing the owner to subscribe for the same reasons. They got pretty aggressive about it. The owner said no and Yelp started boosting negative reviews to coerce the owner into subscribing. I checked Yelp vs Google reviews and there was a stark difference. Yelp was primarily negative reviews and Google was primarily positive reviews.
If they can hide negative reviews, they can also hide positive reviews.
Better Business Bureau does the same thing. Ratings are based on their paid subscription tier, NOT reviews.
Btw there is a small german lemmy community for posting and requesting product reviews.
I don’t know if something in english exist.
The last like… 5 times I’ve left an Amazon review with some criticism, I’ve gotten full refund offers. The most recent one they want to send me a new version.
Pornhub.
I’ve got this obsession with reading 1 star reviews of places in about to eat, or even when choosing some place to get some scran.
It doesn’t sway my opinion, I just like reading what the unhinged Karen’s are whinging about.
I’ve worked most of my life in hospitality so I guess I’ve a slanted (biased) view on things
I don’t anymore. I don’t know a single page that is reliable. On google even three star reviews get removed, so good reviews are meaningless.
Anything but Yelp. Depending.
On a rare occasion I leave reviews on a seller’s page on a local online marketplace as part of a trust system. I don’t use a Google account or anything else that requires my name to be connected to a review. Since I mostly buy directly from manufacturers, I will sometimes leave a star rating if there is an option. I would consider leaving a more detailed review if a product or service was exceptionally good or to warn about a potential hazard.
Now that OP mentioned it, I just realized how few alternatives there are to Google Maps…
For reading reviews, sadly I think Google is still by far the best review aggregator especially for restaurants, in big cities especially the star ratings are scarily accurate (edit: with caveats). I guess expert reviews (such as all of Michelin’s ratings) are good too but they aren’t always available
For writing reviews, I sometimes order food with apps (recently using Too Good To Go) so I’d still leave comprehensive reviews on those. If the place is not on OpenStreetMaps I’d add it. Other times sadly I just don’t, I don’t really have a functional Google account at this point
Agreed Google maps is the best review aggregator (and I wish it wasn’t) but “the star ratings are scarily accurate”? I think you mean “hugely inflated”. Like almost any review system a I’ve seen recently: if you like a place and you give less than a 5 then you’re hurting it.
Yes they are… the reason I think that way is that I like to look at relative rankings; as in, it’s not accurate to just look at how many stars a place got, but rather compare it with other places around it
If I recall… at least in Chicago where good restaurants easily get 500+ ratings. I have never had a “miss” at a place 4.7 stars or above on Google, and the local “cult classic” was at like 4.9; 4.5-4.6 can be hit-or-miss; any fine dining below 4.5 is almost always a miss. Obviously since almost none of those establishments got below 4, just looking at the number of stars isn’t useful… but if I have adjust my expectations accordingly (>=4.6 is solid, <=4.4 is bad) it’s actually quite useful
Sadly I have no clue whether it translates to other places. Fairly certain ppl in my current city are a lot more critical (so maybe a 4.7 in Chicago would be… 4.4 here, or something like that)
4.5-4.6 can be hit-or-miss
How is that not inflated? For my personal ratings, a three is something I’d be happy to eat every day. A five is close to unattainable. It’s basically centered on 2.5 with something like a tapered normal distribution. It’s tedious mapping out so I’m not lowering ratings for good places so I don’t rate anymore.
But getting past me being difficult, you can’t even rate 4.5 can you? Isn’t that information being lost when the way people rate is basically 5 for thumb up and every other number is a thumb down?
You’re right about it being useful to look at relative ratings, I just wouldn’t label that as really accurate.
It’s a separate issue but you brought up categories. I never loved rating in a situation like on Airbnb where one place might be a deliberately expensive penthouse and another might be deliberately a cheap shared room in the wilderness, especially with something like a “cleanliness” rating
For reviewing, there’s nothing else but Google, Facebook or Instagram in my country, as far as I’m aware.
A few attempts were made, but it’s really hard to get a foot in nowadays.
